In my experience, their tech job listings list tech degrees as a must-have. That seems to be a common attribute of companies that care more about HR box ticking than technical excellence, alas.
For me, it's a practical and ideological thing. My resume is written in LaTeX (with a plain text version) and unless I'm missing something, there is no good or easy way to convert from LaTeX to MS Word. I also have doubts about a company that insists on word documents - it smells like inflexibility and a heavy-handed top down management approach.
Considering Amazon didn't develop the system, I don't think the choice of software by the HR department is really something that is safe to make generalizations from.
According to Bezos you're wrong. If technology infuses all of their processes that also includes hiring.
And let's not forget Conway's law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Law
Everything matters. If only because good people will ignore companies that have stupid hiring processes.
Word should be perfectly happy reading that. And a lot of places that say they only accept Word won't notice the difference. (I don't know about Amazon.)
So the HR department is in the driver's seat on hiring is a good proxy for determining how good their engineering is.
Personally I think a better indicator than if a company is they Word-only or not is the quality of their job postings. HR is not competent to write job descriptions for engineers, and the idiotic descriptions that get passed around the internet are almost always an indicator that hiring is "HR's responsibility."
I hope that you agree that txt and pdf files are just as convenient formats to read as doc ones. IMHO it is irritating when someone insists that any document you send them should be in the format of the application they write documents with.
Furthermore, these are no absolutes. If the State asks me to send a document in doc format, I will. Despite pretenses, these companies (and HR depts) are not Republic of Greater Timbuktu really - so I will skip, thank you. :)
As an employer it is more important to find good cultural fits than it is as an employee, since it is typically easier for employees to leave than it is to fire them.
This seems like a good cultural filter to me (on both sides).
However, because I took the initiative to teach myself an industry standard text markup language in order to make a CV that looks really nice and will always display and print properly (and is distributed in the most widely-agreed upon document format for that purpose), you want to exclude me? I'm not submitting in PDF to be difficult or to take a stance, it's a convenient, standardised and well supported format which I am using for its intended purpose.
Comparing smoke signals to PDF is completely disingenuous, as is bundling together "people who happen to submit their CV to you as a PDF" and "people who would flat-out refuse to submit their CV as a .doc".
I use Ubuntu at home. As someone who will need to work with Ubuntu Server at work, I think that's a good thing for my employability. Using Microsoft Word in Ubuntu is not an option for me.
So it's a Giant Pain in the Butt to produce a Word-formatted resume (no, OpenOfice and Google Docs don't make it reliably look good), and there's no reason they need that because they're not going to edit it.
On the other hand, it's easy for me to produce a PDF, which will look better anyway, and it can be done using the OS I will be using at the job I'm applying for.
Being told, effectively, "we require you to install Windows so that you can submit a nice-looking resume for this job working with Unix" is annoying. It's a small factor in how interested I am in the job, but a factor nonetheless, because it shows (to me) that technical people are not running the company.
Works out well for everyone - so, to some degree, a valid filter.
Want an impressive resume? Think latex!
Want an even more impressive? Build up your resume and portfolio online.
Yes that can also be done with a PDF, but it is difficult enough that they don't.
You don't think that filtering out people who have issues with the HR organization processing resume's isn't a "Filter?"
All technology is about making stuff work like clockwork. That's like.. what it's all about. This applies to human processes just as much as machine ones.
Conformity is one way to create good clockwork machines.
Your reasons strike me as childish. Word is still the best word processor by far. Personally I respect people who use Word because it means they're willing to use the best software despite it being associated with Microsoft. Word for Mac is about a billion times more sophisticated than Pages.
Anyway to each his own.
I'm not trying to mock you, I just really feel this way.
I once sent a .doc file to a potential employer, and when I arrived for my interview I saw that the font it had fallen back to (since it didn't have the exact one I'd used) was an aliased version of Courier for some ridiculous reason. It was ugly and difficult to read, the spacing was entirely incorrect, and it was generally a mess. If I were an employer and received a resume that looked like that, I'd surely count it as points against them (though it's possible that accepting Word document resumes means that this happens frequently and you get used to it).
I don't mind using MS Word at work, but I don't use it at home and have no intention of paying for it, so being able to provide someone a reliable, working document is not a guarantee unless I'm using PDF.
I mean I feel your pain, Word Docs give me the cold shivers, but there are some tools.
In short, if your format messes up a little bit no one cares.
Unless the HR department intends to edit your resume, why on earth wouldn't they accept PDF?
Why not just send it in a decent format and see what happens? Just because they say they'll reject it doesn't mean they will.
I don't know about 6 months ago, perhaps their policy has changed.
Also, for Amazon and other companies, there is a world of difference going through their public-facing recruiting process and getting to know someone on an interesting team through your network, and getting hired through them.